[PATCH 3/4] NFS: avoid deadlocks with loop-back mounted NFS filesystems.

[NeilBrown]

Support for loop-back mounted NFS filesystems is useful when NFS is
used to access shared storage in a high-availability cluster.

If the node running the NFS server fails, some other node can mount the
filesystem and start providing NFS service.  If that node already had
the filesystem NFS mounted, it will now have it loop-back mounted.

nfsd can suffer a deadlock when allocating memory and entering direct
reclaim.
While direct reclaim does not write to the NFS filesystem it can send
and wait for a COMMIT through nfs_release_page().

This patch modifies nfs_release_page() to wait a limited time for the
commit to complete - one second.  If the commit doesn't complete
in this time, nfs_release_page() will fail.  This means it might now
fail in some cases where it wouldn't before.  These cases are only
when 'gfp' includes '__GFP_WAIT'.

nfs_release_page() is only called by try_to_release_page(), and that
can only be called on an NFS page with required 'gfp' flags from
 - page_cache_pipe_buf_steal() in splice.c
 - shrink_page_list() in vmscan.c
 - invalidate_inode_pages2_range() in truncate.c

The first two handle failure quite safely.  The last is only called
after ->launder_page() has been called, and that will have waited
for the commit to finish already.

So aborting if the commit takes longer than 1 second is perfectly safe.

1 second may be longer than is really necessary, but it is much
shorter than the current maximum wait, so this is not a regression.
Some waiting is needed to help slow down memory allocation to the
rate that we can complete writeout of pages.

In those rare cases where it is nfsd, or something that nfsd is
waiting for, that is calling nfs_release_page(), this delay will at
most cause a small hic-cough in places where it currently deadlocks.

Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@xxxxxxx>
---
 fs/nfs/file.c  |   24 ++++++++++++++----------
 fs/nfs/write.c |    2 ++
 2 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)

diff --git a/fs/nfs/file.c b/fs/nfs/file.c
index 524dd80d1898..8d74983417af 100644
--- a/fs/nfs/file.c
+++ b/fs/nfs/file.c
@@ -468,17 +468,21 @@ static int nfs_release_page(struct page *page, gfp_t gfp)
 
 	dfprintk(PAGECACHE, "NFS: release_page(%p)\n", page);
 
-	/* Only do I/O if gfp is a superset of GFP_KERNEL, and we're not
-	 * doing this memory reclaim for a fs-related allocation.
+	/* Always try to initiate a 'commit' if relevant, but only
+	 * wait for it if __GFP_WAIT is set and the calling process is
+	 * allowed to block.  Even then, only wait 1 second.  Waiting
+	 * indefinitely can cause deadlocks when the NFS server is on
+	 * this machine, and there is no particular need to wait
+	 * extensively here.  A short wait has the benefit that
+	 * someone else can worry about the freezer.
 	 */
-	if (mapping && (gfp & GFP_KERNEL) == GFP_KERNEL &&
-	    !(current->flags & PF_FSTRANS)) {
-		int how = FLUSH_SYNC;
-
-		/* Don't let kswapd deadlock waiting for OOM RPC calls */
-		if (current_is_kswapd())
-			how = 0;
-		nfs_commit_inode(mapping->host, how);
+	if (mapping) {
+		nfs_commit_inode(mapping->host, 0);
+		if ((gfp & __GFP_WAIT) &&
+		    !current_is_kswapd() &&
+		    !(current->flags & PF_FSTRANS))
+			wait_on_page_bit_killable_timeout(page, PG_private,
+							  HZ);
 	}
 	/* If PagePrivate() is set, then the page is not freeable */
 	if (PagePrivate(page))
diff --git a/fs/nfs/write.c b/fs/nfs/write.c
index 175d5d073ccf..b5d83c7545d4 100644
--- a/fs/nfs/write.c
+++ b/fs/nfs/write.c
@@ -731,6 +731,8 @@ static void nfs_inode_remove_request(struct nfs_page *req)
 		if (likely(!PageSwapCache(head->wb_page))) {
 			set_page_private(head->wb_page, 0);
 			ClearPagePrivate(head->wb_page);
+			smp_mb__after_atomic();
+			wake_up_page(head->wb_page, PG_private);
 			clear_bit(PG_MAPPED, &head->wb_flags);
 		}
 		nfsi->npages--;


--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/